by Paul Theroux
This man was ranting about the state of writing in the Arab world, with the sort of loudness that seemed like self-parody, and yet it was possible, even likely, that he was not being ironical.
‘The Nobel Prize was given to Naguib Mahfouz, and in so doing it recognized traditional writing. When the prize was given to García Márquez many other Latin American writers were inspired to write books and publish them. But what has happened in the Arab world? Where is Arab literature? Nothing has happened!’
Hearing his name shouted over and over Mahfouz did not appear to be impressed. He remained impassive.
‘Naguib Mahfouz won the first and last Nobel Prize for Arab literature. He won it for all Arabs. But no other Arabs will get the prize.’
The shrillness of the man’s voice underlining this as a criticism also made the speech seem like a piece of buffoonery.
‘Why hasn’t the rest of Arab literature achieved any recognition?’ Now the man was glaring at me. ‘It is a conspiracy by the West!’
I had become the West. Well, I didn’t mind, as long as it kept these people talking, for nothing is more revealing of a person’s mind than a person’s anger. Mahfouz just shrugged. He seemed a worthy laureate – dignified, prolific, rebellious in his point of view, for in this Islamic country he refused to indulge in sanctimony or religion at all, and yet he was gentle, going against the political and religious grain with grace and humor.
There were more attacks on the West – that is, on me – but when I was asked to respond I changed the subject to Nubia. Mahfouz had set many stories in pharaonic times, so I asked him about that – whether he felt, as some historians did, that a complex culture had risen up in the Nile from East and Central Africa through Nubia and Kush to enrich Egypt.
He said, ‘Egyptians conquered Nubia, and Nubians turned around and conquered Egypt.’
‘But are the Nubians the genuine pharaonic people, as it is sometimes claimed?’
‘Everyone asks this question, especially Nubians.’
There was more talk, more shouting, everyone smoking and talking at once. ‘The next Arab–Israeli war will be different!’ a man yelled. I crept down to the bar and drank a beer and when I came back they were still shouting and the gathering around Mahfouz had grown to a small crowd. I had lost my seat. Three hours of this and they were still shouting. Mahfouz went through this five nights a week and found it a tonic.
‘He wants to know where you’re going,’ Raymond said, when I made my excuses and began to leave.
‘To Nubia,’ I said.
Mahfouz said something in Arabic and it was translated.
‘Nu bia is “The Gold Place.” Nub means “gold.” ’
Before I took the train to Aswan, and still awaiting a Sudanese visa, I decided to boost my spirits by getting an Ethiopian visa. That would be easy, I was told, because Ethiopia was still at war with its breakaway province of Eritrea, now a sovereign state – but a battle-scarred sovereign state littered with corpses, casualties of war. No one wanted to go to Ethiopia.
Some consulates are so atmospheric – a certain quality of dust and old furnishings and the lingering odors of the national dish. The Ethiopian Consulate in Cairo gave me that impression: faded glory, high ceilings, beat-up sofas, unswept floors, the aromas of fasting food, the fermented smell of injera and spiced beans, the thick nutty fragrance of Abyssinian coffee, a slight stinkiness of old-fashioned men’s suits and stained neckties.
I was received warmly by the balding 34-year-old consul general, Mr Eshete Tilohun. He was small with an impressive head, a big bulging brow that would have suited an extra-terrestrial or a math whizz, and deep-set eyes. He told me that for seventy US dollars I could have a visa that would remain valid for two years.
‘Look!’ he said, a cry of anguish, lifting his eyes from my passport.
A large multicolored map of Ethiopia and the surrounding countries in the Horn of Africa covered part of the far wall of his office.
‘No outlet to the sea!’ he said in a lamenting voice. ‘Eritrea! Djibouti! Somalia! And we are land-locked. That is why we are poor!’
‘What about the war with Eritrea?’
‘Not our fault,’ he said. ‘It is those people. Bring an Eritrean here and you would see the difference in culture. Ha!’
He had rubber stamped my passport but he had not filled in any of the blanks. His pen was poised, but he was still clucking over the map.
‘Djibouti – so small! The soldiers of the Derg wrecked the country. Mengistu gave Djibouti away. The Eritreans made trouble. The Somalis are just bandit people.’
‘But things are quiet now?’
‘Very quiet!’ His eyes bulged when he emphasized a point. I liked his passion. He seemed to care that I wanted to go to Ethiopia. He reflected, ‘Of course the Emperor made his mistakes. The country was backward.’
‘In what way backward?’
‘Feudal,’ he said, and shrugged, and went on, ‘But go to Tana! See churches! Go to Gondar and Tigre. The women have tattooed faces there. They are good Christians – since AD 34 they have been Christians. They have been Jews for longer. Go to the southwest. See the Mursi people. The naked Mursi people. Your name is?’
‘Paul.’
‘Paul, the Mursi are the last naked people in the world.’
I disputed this and told him in detail about nudist camps in such places as the United States and Europe, how the campers might play bare-assed ping-pong, or eat or chitchat or swim, mother naked.
‘No! They go into the street like this?’ Mr Tilohun asked.
‘Just around their camp,’ I said.
‘Like the Mursi.’
‘For them it’s not sex. It’s health.’
‘Exactly like the Mursi! They say, “Why do you wear these clothes?” ’
Mr Tilohun tried to look shocked and indignant but you could see he found the whole idea of public nudity extravagantly funny. ‘One of my friends had his picture taken with a Mursi woman. She had no clothes on at all!’
Mr Tilohun’s eyes glittered at the thought of his decently clothed friend standing next to the naked woman – who, by the way, being a Mursi might not have been wearing a dress but would have worn a saucer-sized plug in her lower lip.
‘The Mursi are real Africans,’ Mr Tilohun said. ‘And there are others. The Oromo. The Galla. The Wolayta.’
‘I can’t wait,’ I said, and meant it.
At one point, speaking of my trip and the road south, Mr Tilohun said, ‘There is only one road going south in Ethiopia. It is the road to Johannesburg. The longest road in Africa. You just keep going.’
The weather had not changed, nor had the weather report. ‘Tomorrow – Dust’ was the forecast, and it occurred as predicted, but more dramatically than before, a high deep dust cloud approaching from the west, looking like a mountain range on the move, gray and dense, overwhelming the city, and at last the sun setting into it, turning into a dull disc. It was in fact a dust storm, with the appearance of fog but the texture of grit, covering everything, the pages of the book I was reading, blurring the windows of Cairo, getting into my teeth.
One last visit to the Sudanese. Mr Qurashi said, ‘Next week, inshallah.’
Ten days earlier, on my arrival in Cairo, inshallah had meant, ‘God willing’ and ‘Soon’ and then ‘Eventually’ and ‘In the fullness of time.’ Later it meant ‘We hope’ and ‘Don’t count on it.’ Now it meant, ‘You wish!’, ‘No way!’ and ‘Not bloody likely!’
3 Up and Down the Nile
The Philae, a river cruiser, lay aslant of the bank, captive in her mooring lines in the winter sunshine at Aswan on the Nile – yes, Heart of Darkness opens something like this. I really did suspect that I might be headed to a dark place and as with all long trips I fantasized that I might die there. Last night’s rain had freshened the air and turned the riverbank to gleaming paste. Fellaheen with fishing poles stood in mud to their knees and other muddy men were calling out, ‘Felucca ride! Felucca
ride!’
A young man in a grubby white gown said to me, ‘We go. Nice felucca. We find Nubian banana.’
‘Nubian banana?’
‘Big banana,’ he said, and made an unambiguous gesture near a portion of his grubby gown. ‘You come with me. Big banana.’
He went on flattering himself until I said, ‘Oh, bugger off.’
His sort of importuning was common in the tourist-haunted parts of Egypt where I regularly saw visiting men and visiting women tacking in quaint feluccas at dusk towards the less-frequented parts of the Nile embankment, where unobserved in the shadows of overhanging ferns, they would find the Nubian banana.
I had been told to board the Philae at noon for the scenic trip downriver to Luxor, where the boat stopped and I would continue. I planned to keep going, overland, in Africa, on the longest road trip of my life, over the frontier to Wadi Halfa and Upper Nubia and beyond to Dongola and Khartoum, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and deeper south to Malawi, via Zomba and Limbe, where I had lived so long ago, to see what had happened to Africa while I had been elsewhere.
I had come here from Cairo in a sleeper on the night train. The taxi driver had asked for fifty Egyptian pounds (about $12). I offered him thirty, assuming he would negotiate as all the others had done, but instead he became peevish and indignant and lapsed into a lofty silence, no haggling at all. At the station, which was very crowded with commuters and cars, he became ridiculously attentive, he bowed to me, he insisted on carrying my bag, he parted the crowd, he found the right platform, the Aswan train, even the section of track where the sleeper would stop. So I handed him fifty for the extra attention he had given me. He scrupulously fished in his purse and gave me twenty pounds in change and thanked me in a sneering way. I tried to hand the money back to him. He touched his heart, waving away the tip. Wounded feelings had turned him into a paragon of virtue.
Yet I had been so touched by the trouble he had taken, and his elaborate courtesies that I persisted, and it became a charade, face-saving on both our parts, as I pursued him down the high road, so to speak, insisting he accept the tip. At last I uttered the right formula, Ashani ana (‘For my sake’), and begged him to accept, and he took it, holding the money like a trifle, his favor to me: a very clever man and a lesson to me in Egyptian pride.
Rameses I Station, usually called Cairo Railway Station, is a century old, like the railway system itself, which stretches from Alexandria on the shores of the Mediterranean, to Aswan on the Upper Nile, at the northern edge of Lake Nasser – the border of Sudan on the south side. The design of the station is of interest, and it has been said that it represents the epitome of nineteenth-century Egyptian architects’ desire to combine classical and Islamic building styles, in response to Khedive Ismail’s plan to create a ‘European Cairo’ – Moorish meets modern.
Kings, queens, princes, heads of state, and generals have arrived and departed here. One of Naguib Mahfouz’s earliest heroes, the ultranationalist anti-British rabble rouser, Saad Zaghlul, escaped an assassination attempt at Cairo Station on his return from one of his numerous exiles, in 1924. Given Egypt’s history of dramatic arrivals and departures the railway station figures as a focal point and a scene of many riotous send-offs and welcomes.
The best story about Cairo Railway Station, told to me by a man who witnessed it unfold, does not concern a luminary but rather a person delayed in the third class ticket line. When this fussed and furious man at last got to the window he expressed his exasperation to the clerk, saying, ‘Do you know who I am?’
The clerk looked him up and down and, without missing a beat, said, ‘In that shabby suit, with a watermelon under your arm, and a Third Class ticket to El Minya, who could you possibly be?’
To leave the enormous sprawling dust-blown city of gridlock and gritty buildings in the sleeper to Aswan was bliss. It was quarter to eight on a chilly night. I sat down in my inexpensive First Class compartment, listened to the departure whistles, and soon we were rolling through Cairo. Within minutes we were at Gizeh – the ruins overwhelmed by the traffic and the bright lights, the tenements and bazaar; and in less than half an hour we were in open country, little settlements of square mud-block houses, fluorescent lights reflected in the canal beside the track, the blackness of the countryside at night, a mosque with a lighted minaret, now and then a solitary car or truck, and on one remote road about twenty men in white robes going home after prayers. In Cairo they would have been unremarkable, just part of the mob; here they looked magical, their robes seeming much whiter on the nighttime road, their procession much spookier for its orderliness, like a troop of sorcerers.
I went into the corridor and opened the train window to see the robed men better, and there I was joined by Walter Frakes from St Louis, an enormous man with a long mild face, and a smooth bag-like chin, who found his compartment small, ‘but what’s the use of fussing?’ He was traveling with his wife, Marylou, and another couple, the Norrises, Lenny and Marge, also from St Louis. They too were heading to Aswan to meet a boat and take a river cruise.
‘And if I don’t get a decent bed on that ship I’m going to be a wreck,’ Walter Frakes said. He was a very gentle man in spite of his size, which I took to be close to 300 pounds; and he was kindly and generally uncomplaining. All he said in the morning was: ‘Didn’t get a wink of sleep. Tried to. Woke up every time the train stopped. Must have stopped a hundred times. Durn.’
I had woken now and then as the train had slowed at crossings, or at the larger stations. There were sometimes flaring lights, barking dogs, otherwise the silence and the darkness of the Nile Valley, and a great emptiness: the vast and starry sky of the Egyptian desert, and that road south that ran alongside the train, the only road south, as Mr Tilohun had said, the road to Johannesburg.
In the bright early morning I saw a sign saying, Kom-Ombo – 8 km, indicating the direction to its lovely temple with a dual dedication, to Horus, the hawk-headed god, and Sobek, the croc-skulled deity. Another sign said, Abu Simbel Macaroni, and depicted its glutinous product in a red bowl.
Date palms in clusters, orange trees, low boxy houses, donkey carts piled high with tomatoes, the occasional camel, the men in white gowns and skullcaps, the boys walking to the fields carrying farm implements, and the wide slow river and the flat bright land shimmering under the blue sky. This was new Egypt but it was also old Egypt, for I had seen many of these images in the Cairo Museum – the adzes and mattocks the boys carried I had seen looking much the same, and the same heavy browed bullocks I had seen hammered in gold or carved in stone I saw browsing by the river; the same dogs with upright tails and big ears, the same narrow cats, and had I seen a snake or a croc they would have had counterparts in gold on a chariot or else mummified and moldering in a museum case.
Some of those cap and gowned men were seated in groups eating pieces of bread loaves the same shape I had seen in the museum removed intact, solid and stale, from ancient tombs; the same fava beans that had been disinterred from crypts were being gobbled up from wagons of men selling foul, the stewed beans that are still an Egyptian staple. The same-shaped ewers and pitchers and bowls I had seen as old artifacts were visible here in the hands of women faffing around at the kitchen doors of their huts.
The Nile was near, about 300 yards from bank to bank, slow moving and light brown, showing clouds on its surface, with green fields on either side, some with marked-out plots and others divided into date plantations, hawks drifting over them on the wind currents, and in the river feluccas with sails – impossible to see these sails and not think of gulls’ wings. And then, as though indicating we were approaching a populous place, there was a succession of cemeteries, great long slopes of sun-baked graves, and the grave markers, small rectangles set into the stony ground, with raised edges, like a whole hillside of truckle beds where the dead people lay. Beyond the next hill was Aswan.
This easy train trip south from Cairo to Aswan had rushed me 500 miles into Africa, almost to the far edge of E
gypt, to the shore of the lake – Lake Nasser – that borders the Sudan. With a visa I could have got a ferry down the lake and nipped over the border: a boat left the High Dam every week, bringing workers to Wadi Halfa, in Nubia. But I had no visa yet.
Aswan was mainly a bazaar and a destination for tourists heading for the ruins. But it was a good-natured bazaar, divided in half – local people buying melons and grapes and fava beans and coffee and spices, and tourists haggling over plaster images of the pyramids and the Sphinx, and Nefertiti, brassware depicting King Tut’s shiny face and colorful carpets, walking sticks and T-shirts. Egyptian tourist kitsch is to my mind the ugliest in the world, and some of it ambitious too: expensive malachite funerary urns, scale-model sarcophagi complete with model mummy, stone carved cats and hippos.
Heavily armed policemen were all over the place. There was a reason, especially here. Temples and ruins and tourist destinations were often targeted by Muslim extremists. There were attacks inside railway trains, and many shots fired into First Class from beside the tracks as the Aswan train made its way south – shooting into First was the best way of hitting a tourist. But there were kidnappings too, and ransoms paid. Egypt, especially the Nile Valley, had a reputation as a danger zone.
There were metal detectors at the entrances to most buildings, though they were seldom used and seemed more symbolic than practical. Perhaps they didn’t work? Certainly the electricity supply was unreliable and there seemed to be a labor shortage. The armed men, with assault rifles slung at their sides, meant to reassure the tourists, simply looked sinister and added to the atmosphere of menace. The touts and curio-sellers were persistent, nagging, stalking, tugging sleeves, there was donkey shit everywhere and the sound of car horns and loud music playing at the tape-and-CD stalls, and pestering beggars, lepers, and the usual naggers from restaurants and coffee shops snatching at passersby. The bazaar and its density of hangers-on and hawkers have their nearest analogue in an American shopping mall – just as diverting, as much a time-killer and a recreation. The pedestrian zone, the food court, the wedged together shops of the mall, all have their counterparts in the Egyptian bazaar, which may be dirtier, smellier, and noisier, but is much cheaper and better-humored.